Doc was already stretched out on a plastic lounge chair in the front room, reading a paperback he'd picked up at a thrift store. He used the front room as a bedroom because he liked the view from the front window. He set the book aside and looked up, curious.
Did the professor own up to busting the irrigation pipes?” he asked.
“Nah, I don’t think she did it.”
“Told you so,” Doc said, then went back to reading while Jack continued to scan the room, looking for clues. The fireplace was huge, tall and wide enough for cooking. He’d taken a tour at Colonial Williamsburg shortly after he arrived in town, wherethe guide said fireplaces like this were made to cook a number of things simultaneously. The small notch-alcove cut into the back was probably for baking bread. Holes in the brick probably once held rungs on which water could be heated and stews simmered on cold winter days.
It would have been hard to turn out a perfectly baked chicken pot pie like Alice just made. He hadn’t even told her how good it was. He just shoveled it down like a barbarian and then asked for seconds.
“I’m heading up for bed,” he said. Doc gave him a little salute but didn’t tear his eyes off his book.
It was too early for bed, but his laptop had plenty of power and he could write a request to Kyle to see if the security cameras mounted at the club house spotted something suspicious. Maybe some drunk college students broke the irrigation lines, or angry environmentalists, or even one of his ex-girlfriends. He’d dated plenty of women, but backed away the moment anything got serious, so he doubted any of them would care enough to look him up and haunt him at this point in his life.
The bedroom window caught his attention. That seventeenth-century window filled with old graffiti scratched into it was suddenly a lot more interesting than security cameras. He smiled a little at the spot where Elizabeth and William Tucker scratched their names in 1771. Someone had carved a snake and some palm fronds. They didn’t look like the kind of palm fronds from here in Virginia. Were they native to England? Or some kind of biblical or ancient Egyptian thing? They looked very stylized.
Although some of the scratchings had been done in spindly, somewhat sloppy lettering, the mark at the top of the window was different. In the upper left corner the letters were carved with purpose and clarity: SVOTZ∞
Could it be a date in Roman numerals? He checked his phone, but aside from the V, none of the letters were used in the Roman number system.
What about a town? Or somebody’s last name? And what about that sideways figure 8? In calculus, it was the symbol for infinity, but maybe there were other meanings for it.
He’d never had much interest in history, but he liked solving puzzles. He scrolled through his phone, searching the internet for various meanings for the letters.
According to Google, there were no towns or villages named SVOTZ. The translator app didn’t reveal any meaningful translations of the word. Could it be an acronym? If so, it opened up a whole world of possibilities that were too numerous to count.
Frustration drove him downstairs. “Hey, Doc, can you come up here for a minute?”
Doc tossed his book aside and the chair creaked as he got out of it. The old vet followed Jack back up the stairs and listened as Jack pointed to the strange markings.
“It could be a code for something,” Doc said, rubbing the stubble on his leathery face as he peered at the letters carved on the glass. “InThe Da Vinci Code, the guy in the book uses the Atbash cipher to decode old references. All you have to do is substitute each letter with its corresponding letter on the other side of the alphabet. The letter S is eight from the end of the alphabet, so you’d start from the beginning and count to the eighth letter, which is—”
“H,” Jack said.
He jotted it down on the back of a Pop-Tart wrapper. The V corresponded with E. A smile tilted his mouth as he continued decoding the letters:
HELGA
He stood, his heart pounding. Doc stared at the word, equally entranced.
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide her name,” Doc said. “What do you suppose that sideways 8 means?”
Jack stared at the markings but could come up with no ideas. Maybe Alice would know, and he looked forward to telling her about how the nameHELGAwas hidden in plain sight.
Jack was embarrassed by the way he accused Alice of vandalizing his golf course. After acting like an impulsive brute, Alice not only accepted his apology, but was pure class as she invited him to the best dinner he’d had in years.
He still needed to get to the bottom of who broke the irrigation pipes, and the following morning he headed to the police department to file a report. A clerk named Pricilla with brassy red hair and a syrupy drawl cut him off before he could even finish telling her what happened.
“Yeah, we’re already on that one,” she said, her fingernails thick with chipped polish tapping against the keyboard as she called up a record. “Last night a couple of local college kids were drunk and bragging about tearing up a golf course,” Pricilla said. “A bartender overheard and pressed them for details. They called him a stupid townie who probably couldn’t understand the importance of saving the environment, then bragged about how they dug up some pipes and then used their fraternity paddle to bust the irrigation lines. The bartender called the cops, and Lieutenant Sparks hauled them in last night.”
“Is Lieutenant Sparks still on duty?”
He was, and ten minutes later Jack sat across from the night shift officer hearing the rest of the story. The two vandals werefraternity brothers who were staying in town throughout the summer for a special tutoring program, and this was their first brush with the law. Their story ratcheted Jack’s resentment even higher. He struggled with his grades in college as well, but his summers were spent working a full-time job instead of getting into a special tutoring program.
“What kind of charges are they looking at?” he asked Lieutenant Sparks.
“Trespassing and destruction of property. Both are misdemeanors, unless the property is worth more than a thousand dollars, in which case the D.A. will bump it up to a felony.”
The broken irrigation lines were going to costa lotmore than a thousand dollars to fix. Those college kids probably never held down a real job or knew anything about the backbreaking labor of laying irrigation lines. He wanted to teach them a lesson, not ruin their future by saddling them with a felony.
